It was in the Ogden refreshment-room, waiting for the train for San Francisco, that I saw a performance that filled me with astonishment and dismay. It was a man eating his dinner. And let me here remark, with all possible courtesy, that the American on his travels is the most reprehensible eater I have ever seen. In the first place, the knives are purposely made blunt--the back and the front of the blade being often of the same "sharpness"--to enable him to eat gravy with it. The result is that the fork (which ought to be used simply to hold meat steady on the plate while being cut with the knife) has to be used with great force to wrench off fragments of food. The object of the two instruments is thus materially abused, for he holds the meat down with the knife and tears it into bits with his fork! Now, reader, don't say no. For I have been carefully studying travelling Americans at their food (all over the West at any rate), and what I say is strictly correct. This abuse of knife and fork then necessitates an extraordinary amount of elbow-room, for in forcing apart a tough slice of beef the elbows have to stick out as square as possible, and the consequence is, as the proprietor of a hotel told me, only four Americans can eat in a space in which six Englishmen will dine comfortably. The latter, when feeding, keep their elbows to their sides; the former square them out on the line of the shoulders, and at right angles to their sides. Having thus got the travelling American into position, watch him consuming his food! He has ordered a dozen "portions" of as many eatables, and the whole of his meal, after the detestable fashion of the "eating-houses" at which travellers are fed, is put before him at once. To eat the dozen or so different things which he has ordered, he has only one knife and fork and one tea-spoon. Bending over the table, he sticks his fork into a pickled gherkin, and while munching this casts one rapid hawk-like glance over the spread viands, and then proceeds to eat. Mehercule! what a sight it is! He dabs his knife into the gravy of the steak, picks up with his fork a piece of bacon, and while the one is going up to his mouth, the other is reaching out for something else. He never apparently chews his food, but dabs and pecks at the dishes one after the other with a rapidity which (merely as a juggling trick) might be performed in London to crowded houses every day, and with an impartiality that, considered as "dining," is as savage as any meal of Red Indians or of Basutos. Dab, dab, peck, peck, grunt, growl, snort! The spoon strikes in every now and then, and a quick sucking-up noise announces the disappearance of a mouthful of huckleberries on the top of a bit of bacon, or a spoonful of custard-pie on the heels of a radish. It is perfectly prodigious. It defies coherent description. But how on earth does he swallow? Every now and then he shuts his eyes, and strains his throat; this,